Future of D

[Abdulhaq]

On Sunday, 29 October 2023 at 18:00:13 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Sunday, 29 October 2023 at 17:29:51 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
>>
>> D is great but a business decision to use it should be based 
>> on sound principles, not fanboi-isms. For me, if you need to 
>> fork D to use it for a business, that's a red flag.
>
> Why? I would rather say that forking a programming language in 
> order to tailor it for ones need is a serious commitment.

Yes that's a fair comment. What I mean is that for most 
businesses, the choice between D and e.g. C++ is best understood 
in terms of risk /reward.

C++ is the low risk option, for a typical business, because it 
will still be around in 20 years, it will be well maintained, you 
will always be able to find a pool of developers who can maintain 
your code, it will link and compile with thousands of industry 
standard libraries, frameworks, protocols, hardware platforms.

So D is higher risk in that you may find yourself having to spend 
time (and much money) coding up your own libraries and hardware 
support. In 10 years time you might struggle to find D 
developers. However, the reward with D is that you can achieve 
the required functionality, over the next few years, much more 
quickly (i.e. more cheaply) than with C++.

So you choose D if you want to code up a well understood set of 
algorithms/functionalities on known platforms and you want to do 
it quickly/cheaply, and you know that D can provide all that you 
need.

You choose C++ for long term support, a huge breadth of 
platforms, some of which are future platforms you don't yet know 
about, and general maintenance ability over the years.

To finally answer your question, maintaining a compiler/ecosystem 
is a significant cost overhead the reduces the rewards of D to 
such an extent that it is normally wiser to choose C++.